Building a search engine friendly site
The key things to look for are simplicity, ease of use, andenough relevant content that visitors understand your business and are able tolearn enough to want to contact you.

Please make honest and professional comments(both positiveand negative), but remember to be respectful of everyone’s feelings. The goal is to help each other be successful.

note: This topic is for Sitebuilder sites only. If you built a site in Websitebuilder, then please use this topic.

Sanford Latin Mass - Nice site but it takes a lot of time to download and I believe it is because of your pictures. If you use the 'Optimize Button' and 'Save as New Image' this way if you do not like the Optimized Picture you can always go back to the Original Picture File. This will make your Home Page download fast and if you have pictures on other pages do the same.

Although still a work in progress, I would appreciate any comments or suggestions (good, bad or indifferent) regarding the appearance, ease of use, whether I've added too many animations, and especially any SEO tips concerning my new website. Thanks in advance!!! :)

Nice to see a site using the new builder! You are headed in the right direction, but I think you may have gone over the top with all the new animations and scaling back could help with SEO and visitor retention.I'm just going to comment on the Home page to give you an idea of what I mean. When that page opened I literally moved back from the screen - it was so 'in my face' and startled me. HUGE text, lots of motion. Also the words Trouble and Less are repeated for some reason?Your Home page should convey to your visitors what the site is about. You've kind of done that with the GIGANTIC lettering, but to please the Search Engines you will probably need more content and less motion. A lot of the information on your Tickets page would be better on your Home page I think. It gives the who, what, etc. that is important to keep the visitor wanting to know more and will feed the search engines with info to help with how they index the site.I think you've had a lot of fun with this, but scaling back is more apt to convey you offer a professional service.Like I said, you're on the right track and I'll look forward to seeing the final product!

I would appreciate any feedback on my Homestead site..https://www.crazyabouttravel.com/I have been building this site over the past 20 years...and am in a bit of a funk as to how I can improve it. All feedback will be appreciated. Thanks!

Looks like you have done a lot of work, collecting or making
icon images and lots of information and references. Looks great with lots of
colours to attract children however when I went to the first page ‘About
Rebecca’ (about yourself) it takes a long time to download. I believe it is
because of your pictures. If
you use the 'Optimize Button' and 'Save as New Image' this way if you do not
like the Optimized Picture you can always go back to the Original Picture
File. This will make your pages with pictures download faster.

This
next item reminds me of my days in public school when my teacher continued to
tell me to keep my writing within the lines and not over the margin – lol.

Workshops
Available - What I am referring to is the text in the large different coloured
boxes you use for background. Some of the text goes outside the boxes (not a
lot – but a few). Sometimes it looks good when you click on the ‘Publish
Button’ when you are working on the site, but if you re-check it when you have
closed Homestead and use your browser with the domain address and see if the
text is still inside the boxes. Another check you can do is when you have the
site completed, if using a PC check your site out with a Mac to see if both the
text and your pictures show up where you intended them to.

Glimpse
Into Classroom – Great pictures and the direction from the Top Navigation Boxes
works well, however the colour of the text in the boxes is hard to see until
you get your mouse over it and after it has been clicked then it stays the
bright lime green. I know from past work it is hard to find more than the one
lime green that stands out. I sometimes go for a pink or bright red and then
use the same colour somewhere around the navigation bar so that it did not look
like a mistake. Same with the page Interventions using purple.

I didn’t go through your site completely, but the
pages that I did see were similar. I hope this helps from another Homesteader.

I think you have done a really nice job on the site. It is easy to navigate and presented consistently throughout the site. You have a great amount of unique content on the various pages, which will help with search engines.

I believe you must be using Internet Explorer though. If you look at the various pages, using Firefox or Chrome you can see how they can display things very slightly different than Internet Explorer. Your prayers page is a prime example. See how the text crowds to the right hand navigation box? While I would like to see the whole site slightly wider, I wouldn't go to that effort at this point as you would need to reorganize each page, and you really can't go too much wider. In this case take a look at each page and tweak the text box just a bit to correct the issue with the browser. You may be able to move the box to the left, or you might need to change the width of the text box.

Overall, a very good effort. It just needs those minor fixes. Good luck with the site. Let us know if you need anything.

Hi terry ellen6103 , Are you referring to the Legion of Mary site? or a different one? That site has a couple different menus, but they are not really drop-down menus. Can you provide the url of the page that you are referring to?

I'm no expert but I think your website looks very beautiful, I like the ease of use as it displays your pages, not muuch scrolling and that's great to see. I like your color choices and your photos are lovely with a nice aura feeling to them.

Hello Drew! Thank you for your feedback. My tests were done with IE only. I had some struggle with the text boxes scrambled around images when viewed in FireFox. I'm currently tweaking those areas with minimal results; I probably will expand the cell padding ..any advice would be most appreciated!

Padding is good. You might be able to solve it that way. You might also want to make sure that there isn't a bunch of overlapping on the elements. If you hit ctrl-a on a page, it will select all elements. If you see much overlapping, you may need to spread things out a bit.

It looks like you are off to a pretty good start. A few things that you may want to be concerned about. The text on your navigation buttons is not linked so the user has to hold the mouse to the side of the text before they can click. This will probably cause some confusion, or some people will just think the links are broken. To preserve the look of the text and buttons, you may want to actually embed the text into the button image and then re-import them into the site.

Also at the top of the page where you have the three photos of the ladies, the overlap might cause some problems depending on what device you are viewing the site on. In particular, some mobile browsers tend to rearrange some of the content to make it fit better. This may or may not be a problem. If you anticipate, or want to get a lot of mobile traffic, you might consider creating a mobile version of the site, once you are done with the main site.

Another thing to consider is the main body/text of the page. It appears you have it embedded right into the image. The font and resolution make it a little bit hard to read, but more importantly, when you have the text embedded into an image, it is not readable by the search engines. Text is probably the single most important component of any website if you are looking to get traffic from the search engines. I realize that the fonts build into SiteBuilder are not as elaborate, but, for search engine purposes, I would suggest changing it.

Nicely done. You have a simple to navigate clean looking site with loads of relevant content. I just have some minor tweaks for you to consider.

1) Some of your page titles contain a hyphen. II would remove that for consistency and readability.

2) The Our services on the Homepage with the purple button feels like it should link to the services page.

3) The links at the bottom of the page that go to other websites should open in a new window. Whenever I am referring a visitor to another site, I want it to pop a new window so that my site is still up when they close it.

The first thing I would consider changing is the color scheme. It's hard to read the blue text against the black background, especially on a small device. Also, if you want, or plan on getting a lot of mobile traffic the best solution is to actually create a mobile version of the site.

I would appreciate reviews of our new website, www.clothesatticd.com. We are a women's upscale consignment boutique under new ownership. Just launched this site and would love to hear if it's all it needs to be in order to get more customers. Thank you

Connie3854, It looks like you are off to a pretty good start, but it's a little hard to tell what direction you are wanting to go with the site. Can you tell us what the main goal or purpose of the site is? For example are you wanting to get into online sales? or is this just to drive traffic to the brick'n mortar store?

In either case a couple things that you may want to focus on is the site content and organization. You might consider adding more text and product descriptions to the pages. This will help the search engines gather more content and help your site get found in the search results and also hopefully convert more visitors into paying customers. Also, you may want to add more links/categories and display products in a more organized fashion. For example creating more categories might make it easier for visitors to find, and see what you have for sale. Consider adding categories for Footwear, Jewelry, Hats, Men's, Womens, Children, etc.

If you do want to get into online sales then it's probably worth considering a SimpleStore or a Storefront Hosting plan. You'll want to make that decision before you do much more work on the existing site. If you opt for a Storefront plan, then you would have to rebuild the site with a different software platform.

1) I would rename the menu item services2. Maybe call it VIP or Discounts.

2) On the more photos to share, it is better not to have any pictures than to have placeholder images.

3) On the About Us page you say competent knowledge. Reading it, I would say extensive knowledge. It seems stronger and accurate.

4) The memorial on the bottom right of the About Us page. I appreciate what you are going for, but for your business, and as a possible customer, I would rather see a pet you take care of with a positive testimonial from the owner.

5) On the Links page, you have 2 websites there, but they aren't actually linked. Create a link to them and have it open in a new window.

6) Make your page titles more informational. Place your City, State, and preferred contact(phone or email) method in there.

I realize there are a few things, but they are mostly nit picky minor things. You did a good job. If you need any help finding anything to make changes, just ask.

Good start, just remember that this is an ongoing project and will never be truly done.

You have made quite a large site, and I am thinking I would make it even larger. Some of your pages are very long, which isn't as bad as scrolling left and right, but some people become impatient with long vertical scrolls. I think I would make a page with each production, and place all the details for that single production on the one page, including the offer to buy tickets.

You might also create a landing page for upcoming shows that has a secondary menu for the individual events.

I would still have a page with the ability to purchase all tickets, but individual buttons could also be added to the specific event page.

I would also remove your mission statement from the homepage as you have a dedicated page for it on the navigation menu.

Those are a couple of ideas that I think would help make the site simpler for people to read and navigate.

I'd love to get any ideas from the community on the website I've built for our business: www.nanasfarmhouse.com

I've never built a site and it might show. We do want to sell online in the future. Right now we're using the site to drive traffic to our store. I've written some of the content at the bottom of each page for two reasons, 1) to keep the site and pages simple and clean 2) for SEO
It works because we show up in a lot of searches but I don't see other sites doing this. Any suggestions or do you think this is okay?

Thanks for submitting your site. As far as the design of the site, it looks pretty good. I like the earthy color tones as they are very appropriate for this type of site/business.

There is just one thing that I would be highly concerned about and that is the text at the bottom of your pages. Because of the way that it's constructed, there's a significant chance that you could be penalized by the search engines for keyword stuffing. Take a look at this page for more information on "keyword stuffing".

For the best SEO results, you'll want to re-write the text on the pages so that it is in a legitimate readable format for humans, rather than trying to trick, or manipulate the search engines. It's hard to read against the textured background so you'll probably want to change the background of the text box to a solid color. When you re-write the text, just put it in an article/paragraph format. Also, do not duplicate the same text from one page to the next. Think of your website as a book. You don't want to repeat the same text/paragraphs in each chapter (web page) of the book. Google will likely penalize your for duplicate content. Each page should contain text that is relevant and specific to that page only.

Also, if you are planning on selling products online any time soon, you may want finalize those plans before you do too much work on this site. Depending on the functionality, type of products, number of products, inventory, shipping, and other features you need, there may be other hosting plans/software packages that are better suited.

Great site, well written and laid out. Also great background, really like that. Your font is too big (Nana's Farmhouse) - you want space to get your fonts to pop, too close to edge. Would clean up top banner, make it larger and drop fonts one point.

This is a common question. Sometimes people spend too much time on the wrong details of a site and never really figure out where the problem is. When this happens, I like to simplify things by breaking down the process and looking at three very basic things.

1. The site appearance. Does the site look professional? Does it look equal or better than your competitors? Can a visitor find what they are looking or tell what the site is about in the first few seconds?

If you answer no to any of these then you may need to consider design changes.

2. Call to Action. What is the purpose of the site? Is it your goal to have customers call you on the phone, fill out a form, place an order online, etc?

3. Get Traffic. The important thing to understand is that even some of the most successful sites on the web may only convert 2-3% of the visitors into paying customers. If you look at your site statistics and you are not getting at least one paying customer out of every 100 visits, then the problem is most likely with # 1 or #2 above. If you are converting 2-3% or more of your visitors, then you'll want to focus more SEO or other methods of driving traffic to the site.

In your particular case, I would focus on #1 and #2 first. My reasoning for this is the bounce rate on your site. Below is a chart showing the % of visitors that leave your site in 2 seconds or less. As you can see, you are losing 2/3rds of your visitors before they even have a chance to look over the home page. This means that they are not immediately finding what they need, or the site does not build confidence or capture their attention. If you are struggling with the design, you may want to give us a call and ask to speak with a design consultant about the possibility of getting a custom site made for you. 800-710-1998. There's no cost to get a quote.

Thanks for the suggestions. I had added the text to the bottom of the pages on a suggestion from a person at Homestead several months ago.
Is there a best way to add the text to each page and still achieve my goal of keeping the pages clean and clutter free?
Also, I'd like to add have a "flash" box with various pictures on the home page but don't want add a "slider" box like the one on my New Arrivals tab. Any pointers? I just don't want it to slow down the loading time of my home page like the sliding box does.

If you have a Flash element in an ".swf" format, you can add it to the page using the regular video element. However, I don't really recommend using Flash any more major players like Google (Android), and Apple (Iphones, Ipads, etc), do not display flash anymore. If you don't want to use a slider, then I would recommend using the HTML5 code shown here.

As far as the best way to add text and keep the pages clean, I would as I suggested above. Rewrite the text so its in a more readable paragraph format designed for humans (not search engines). It's hard to give actual design advice via the community but you are welcome to call us or even speak to a design consultant on the phone to get a quote on a custom design if you are struggling with this.

You've done a good job. The site is simple to navigate and contains relevant a pretty comprehensive content, so the search engines will have a good choice of keywords.

On the NMLS Requirements page, you use a darker background to the text. It makes the black text a little harder to read. Consistency in color also makes the site easier to read. I would match that grey to the other pages, or go white.

1) On the home page, the Contact button and text directly above it are a little difficult to read. I think I would adjust the colors a bit to make it stand out more.

2) On the photo gallery page, it seems you added them as images. If you have larger images consider a photo gallery element. This will align all the thumbnails and allow a click on the image to enlarge. It would allow visitor to get a better look. Also, if you switch to the gallery, put descriptive captions on each image. If you decide to stick with images, add Alt-text to each image.

3) I would change the name of the products page to "Our Concrete" or something more specific to your business.

4) Change the page titles to reflect the information on each page. Include your preferred contact method in the title. For you, it appears to be by phone. Add that number in each page title.

5) Make sure that any word you want to be searched for, appears in the text on your pages. You might want to give the topics above a good read, especially the search engine topic. I think you have a good start. Your site is clean and easy to navigate. It just might be a little light on content, but that is ultimately your call. If you have said everything you can say, then adding more clutters it, but if you can provide more information in a way that ads value to the site, I would do so.

I like the color scheme. One thing I would recommend doing, is when you scroll over the text, making the secondary text bold as well, so its a smooth transition when you scroll over it. I think it would look nice if you use the same green as the EMAIL ME and CALL us background. I would also remove the Contact form at the bottom of the home page and espanol page. Its too large and out of place. You already have the CONTACT US button, and EMAIL us button, I don't think its needed. The About Us page is nice. Looks very professional. I think if you used the same footer at the bottom of the ABOUT US PAGE, on all the pages, that would look great and still give the Call to Action that you want people to see. Lastly, The EMAIL ME button is located in different spots on each page. I would recommend placing it at the same exact spot on each page. Good luck!

Sorry this has taken a while. You have done a really good job of making the site attractive and yet simple to navigate. You made good use of bullets to highlight appropriate items in the content.

There are 2 things I would like to see.

1) It would be good if you could add some more text description of everything. It is a difficult balance between too much and too little. Too little and not all of your keywords will be picked up by the search engines. Too much and you fear site visitors won't read it. I would recommend more rather than less. Put the most important stuff in the first paragraph and go down from there. You will only ever be found in searches for words or combination of words that are in the content of your site. Placement of those words, can also tell the search engines how much value you place on them, and can affect your site's rank for those words. Bold and larger font for important aspects of your business can be very helpful. Don't overuse this tactic though.

2) The second wish is that while I really like the quality of your logo, I feel like it is too tall. On a high resolution monitor it fits better, but on my laptop, I find myself scrolling before I really get any meat from the site.

Sorry for the delay in reviewing. You don't have many pages on your Sitebuilder site. Do you really need it? If I were you, I would create the About Us, and News pages in your Storefront and remove the Sitebuilder site completely. This will give your entire site a more consistent look and feel. It will also save you $20/month. We might need to adjust some DNS settings, but it should be a problem. You might also want to add a Policies page that outlines your policies concerning shipping, returns, and privacy. Your store menu will then look more filled out .

Michael, Very nice job on your site! You put a lot of thought in to the layout, design, and color scheme. It's easy to navigate and very well done! The use of professional/high quality images makes a world of difference!

Ok everyone, here is the list of entered domains. We ask that you look at all the sites and pick the one you believe is the best. On Monday, we will post a survey for voting. The site with the most votes will win the 2 months of free hosting.

I looked for your post on survey for voting, concretedesigned.com, because they offer customizatiion on products, affinity was the one and only worst one because they had me go to each link on there page going crazy looking for there services location-online or phys location and at the end i still couln't come to the conclusion if i wanted it ehre i had to go to purchase the product, besides that they were all good and looked like they provided quallity proucts and service. I would also consider brentair.com for they can invest on an online store, but i would think they would have the money if they supposedly offer work.

Welcome to our feedback topic. This is where hope to have several people help you out. Other Homestead customers and Homestead employees can review your site. We are a little behind as we were not reviewing the sites involved in our contest that has just ended. Hopefully some folks will come and give you their opinion. We definitely will soon.

You have good information on the website, but you might want to trim down the homepage to include just the most important, but general, information and then link to individual pages with specific details

Also, on your homepage your phone number and hours goes into the nav menu and prevents me from going to the about us page.

I am not sure you need the calendar on 3 pages. Since 1 page is a Calendar page, maybe you can just link there from the other pages. It can make the site look busy, and some folks might get confused as to if they are the same or different calendars.

Dino, You have a lot of good information on your site, but I found it a bit hard to navigate. I would recommend adding a main navigation menu to the top of each page so that it's easy to find on each page of the site. Also, nice job adding the Google custom search tool to the site. That can be very helpful especially on large sites. You may want to label it somehow. Perhaps add some text, ie. "Search our Site", above the search tool.

First off, GREAT content. You have tons of relevant information on the site. This is great for the search engines.

I only have a couple of minor suggestions. If you want to use a button style navigation menu, I might search for a better button for your site. You might need to make one, but your text shouldn't run off the button.

Also, the 3 menus you have down the left, should all line up on the left of the screen. The look slightly offset from each other.

The last thing is your before and after page. You have a load of images that are pretty packed together. I am not sure if it is possible, but it might be cool if you could combine these pictures with the testimonials in some cases. Have the picture and then a statement by the person, or just some information about how they went about the process.